Well, it's not like these HFT's discriminate against any particular order/investor class. My point was that those most affected are small traders & investors as they are easier prey for these rip offs.
Jonny, You've nailed it here... Wah! I lost money, and these big firms are manipulating the markets. While I agree that Goldman has a ridiculous advantage with its well-placed politicians, the average HFT outfit is just playing the game by the rules in place. And in reply to a certain head-in-the-sand poster here, the HFT guys *do* provide liquidity. Trust me. As to your original question: Yes, we are in a HFT bubble. It's an arms race, and it's getting tougher to profit. What's left after this race? May the best alpha algo win! p
Bloomberg is wrong, they are not the same thing. That is the correct explanation of flash trading. HF trading is more general a term for computerized algo trading, but you want to be fast, so some pay fees to co-locate at the exchange.
Because they cancel their fake bids/offers and run like hell as soon as there are real orders hitting them, that's why. Their posted volumes are mostly fake.
Your mistake is defending the individual investor in the first place. The market doesn't exist for them, although it's always been marketed that way. If they want to play in these waters, they accept the risk, and the fact that they are the patsy at the table. That doesn't give them the right to bitch about GS having better programmers or faster computers. All this anti-HFT scapegoating is garbage imo.
Why not offer a intelligent counter-argument to why you don't think risk management systems are important instead of giving a completely useless smug post like ''lol'' ?